"There was a time when nails were high-tech. There was a time when people had to be told how to use a telephone. Technology is just a tool. People use tools to improve their lives"
About this Quote
Clancy’s point lands with the dry assurance of someone who spent a career turning gadgetry into plot propulsion: today’s “disruptive” miracle is tomorrow’s hardware-store staple. By invoking nails and telephones, he collapses our tech timeline into a single, humbling rhythm. The objects aren’t random. Nails are banal infrastructure, the kind of innovation that disappears into the background once it works; telephones are a social interface, a technology that required etiquette, instruction, and new habits. Together they sketch a simple thesis with a sharper edge: our awe is predictable, and our panic is often just unfamiliarity dressed up as insight.
The subtext is anti-mystique. Clancy doesn’t deny technology’s power; he strips it of its priesthood. In an era when companies sell “the future” as a brand identity, “Technology is just a tool” reads like a refusal to grant moral status to the device itself. Tools don’t save or doom us; they amplify whatever priorities, incentives, and fears we already have. The real battleground is human choice: who controls the tool, who profits, who gets trained, who gets left behind.
Context matters. Clancy wrote in the long shadow of the Cold War, where tech wasn’t lifestyle decoration but statecraft: submarines, satellites, encryption, surveillance. His fiction fetishized detail, yet his worldview here is almost impatiently practical. Stop worshipping the machine, he implies, and start interrogating the people and institutions wielding it - because that’s where consequences live.
The subtext is anti-mystique. Clancy doesn’t deny technology’s power; he strips it of its priesthood. In an era when companies sell “the future” as a brand identity, “Technology is just a tool” reads like a refusal to grant moral status to the device itself. Tools don’t save or doom us; they amplify whatever priorities, incentives, and fears we already have. The real battleground is human choice: who controls the tool, who profits, who gets trained, who gets left behind.
Context matters. Clancy wrote in the long shadow of the Cold War, where tech wasn’t lifestyle decoration but statecraft: submarines, satellites, encryption, surveillance. His fiction fetishized detail, yet his worldview here is almost impatiently practical. Stop worshipping the machine, he implies, and start interrogating the people and institutions wielding it - because that’s where consequences live.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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